Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, exhilarating, EPIC speculative masterpiece...

In a future Japan, a damaged teenage tech prodigy meets an enigmatic waitress in a tiny Tokyo café, sparking an epic journey across Japan that will change everything, forever. The novel explores the isolation we can all feel as outsiders and the dangers of a world where everything can be faked.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 16 March 2023
Publisher: Orenda Books

A damaged teenage tech prodigy meets an enigmatic waitress in a tiny Tokyo café, sparking an epic journey across Japan that will change everything, forever.

A captivating, masterful novel with an extraordinary mystery at its heart, "Beautiful Shining People" blooms into an emotional and soulful tale that reckons with the isolation we can all feel as outsiders.

SciFi Now Book of the Month, "That Beautiful Shining People" isn't just a slipstream novel with pretensions to being literature. In great part, it's down to the deftness and tenderness with which Grothaus draws his central relationship, allowing us to explore a world of robots and deepfakes that's just unfamiliar enough to be exotic.

SFX Magazine Book of the Month, "A fascinating exploration of what it means to be human in a world where everything can be faked. Wonderful, insightful, and thoughtful." James Oswald.

This world is anything but ordinary, and it's about to change forever.

It's our world, but decades into the future.

An ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be.

Except for seventeen-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change for him when he enters a tiny café on a cold Tokyo night.

A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia.

But Neotnia hides a secret of her own—a secret that will turn John's unhappy life upside down. A secret that will take them from Tokyo to the far corners of Japan, and beyond.

A journey that will challenge their beliefs, their loyalties, and their very sense of reality.

A story that will leave you breathless, and longing for more.

In "Beautiful Shining People," Grothaus has created a masterpiece of science fiction, a novel that blends heart, humor, and mystery in a way that is both fresh and timeless.

So, grab a copy of this extraordinary book and prepare to be transported to a world that is both familiar and utterly unexpected. You won't be able to put it down until you've reached the final page.

Weight: 264g
Dimension: 129 x 199 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781914585647